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shanastoryteller · 5 months ago

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let the beltane fires burn

The Halliwells are descended from Melinda Warren, are the branch in which the greatest power resides, the line that would birth the most powerful witches to walk the earth.

It's not the only line.

Deanna knows about hunters, knows what they don’t know and don’t understand and that they killed her family. But Samuel didn’t kill her family. Samuel’s a good man who saves innocents, the same way she was raised to, if not how she was raised to do it.

She’s all alone. It’s not safe to be a witch.

The day before her wedding, she binds her powers.

When Mary is a year and a day, she does the same to her. It’s safer this way. Better. The world is so unkind to witches, even ones like them, born into it, with their power baked into their blood. Better to fight evil with bullets and knives than the strange terrible thing she’s destined to give her daughter, that her daughter is destined to pass along to her own daughters.

She never tells Samuel. There’s no reason to.

When Mary is old enough, when she’s talking of running and rebelling and all those things Samuel thinks will never come to pass and Deanna knows almost certainly will – running and rebelling is in her blood as surely as the magic, but there’s no binding potion for that – she tells her daughter what they are. What she’ll have to do to keep her future daughters safe, if she has them. It’s the only potion she ever teaches Mary how to brew, the only one she’ll ever need.

The day after Dean’s first birthday, Marry brews the potion and feeds it to him. He cries more after, doesn’t settle as quickly, and John worries and Mary reassures him and tells herself she’s done the right thing. Whatever it is that Dean feels he’s lost, he’s better off without it. She’s going to be normal. Her children are going to be normal.

She intends to do the same for Sammy, but she burns above his crib when he’s six months old.

John sees Sammy levitate a toy towards him when he’s two years old and shouts so loudly that he drops it, tears running down his face and wailing in the face of his father’s anger. Dean comes running from the other room and reaches for Sammy, letting his brother’s chubby fingers tangle in his shirt. “What’s wrong?” he asks, eyes wide.

He doesn’t answer, rubbing his hand over his face and heart pounding in his chest.

What did that demon do to his son?

What did it turn him into?

Is Sammy even human anymore?

He doesn’t react to salt, to holy water, to silver. John loses his temper every time something moves inexplicably and eventually it stops, by the time Sam’s in kindergarten he’s just like all the other kids.

John watches, fear and suspicion and something uglier caught up inside of him.

What is his son?

Sam figures out young that he’s a freak.

Dad and Dean just think he’s weak, just think he has nightmares, and he lets them. He only practices the telekinesis when he’s alone and every time he almost gathers the courage to tell his brother or father about it, to finally come clean, he’s viciously reminded how much they hate the things they hunt, how they’d never accept it, accept him, and as soon as he tells them what he is, he’ll lose them.

He doesn’t know what he is, really. Only that he’s not normal.

Eventually he stops seeing things in his sleep, instead getting them when he’s awake, more vivid and real than the monsters that plague his dreams. He sees people being hurt, people who need help, and it goes against everything he’s been taught to leave them to their fate.

But how can he explain it to his family? He can’t.

He’s thirteen the first time he sneaks out and saves a woman from one of his visions, finding her in the dark alley he’d seen her die in. He puts a bullet in the man’s chest, but it barely stops him, and then she and him both are getting a fireball thrown at them.

Sam shoves his hand in front of him, pushing back against the heat, refusing to die the same way his mother died.

The fireball returns to the man, catching him in the chest and he screams, disappearing into the fire until he’s nothing more than a smudge on the ground.

“Wow,” the woman breathes. Sam turns to her, trying to come up with some sort of explanation, when she continues, “I’ve never met a witch with active powers before.”

“I’m not a witch,” he says automatically, thinking of bargains made with demons, of hex bags and rotting meat and blood sacrificed.

She looks between him and the smudge on the ground incredulously. “Are you sure about that?”

Yes. No.

He doesn’t know what he is.

She leads him back to her apartment, stacks books into hix arms, and then makes him a sandwich when his stomach rumbles. His age worries her, his ignorance worries her even more, and everything she’s saying sounds like kooky new age bullshit except for the way that it explains everything he’s never been able to.

There are witches and demons and monsters nothing like anything his father’s ever talked about.

It’s easy to research, at least, because his dad thinks there’s a kernel of truth in every piece of supernatural bullshit. Dean makes fun of him for digging into girly, feel-good crap rather than the harder stuff, but his dad just seems relieved he’s taking an interest all. Sam starts taking notes, keeps them all in a folder until Dad buys him a journal, patting his back when he hands it over like it’s a rite of passage.

To Dad, it’s his first hunting journal.

Sam runs his hand down the soft leather spine and knows he’s starting his book of shadows.

The visions don’t stop. He saves more innocents, some witches and some mortal, and keeps the record of all the creatures he’s killed in Latin to discourage Dad and Dean from snooping. He uses his telekinesis on hunts only when there’s no other option, only when there’s someone’s life on the line, and he’s as careful as he can be not to get caught.

It should be a relief, to find out there are other people like him, to know that he’s a force for good in the world.

There’s no way he can explain the existence of a different type of witches to his father without putting a target on their backs.

Some witches have been targeted by hunters, ones who were trying to help but got caught in the crossfire, ones that had turned evil and needed to be stopped, but it’s not often he finds a witch that regards hunters with anything but fear. At least when his family are the ones sniffing around, he can give them a heads up, can tell them how to avoid their attention.

He’s had a lot of practice, after all.

Sam is sixteen when he’s a little too slow.

The innocent is safe and the demon is killed, but his chest is torn open and he’s bleeding out on the pavement.

“Oh no, oh no,” the woman he’d saved chants, pressing her hands against him, even though it’s pointless, even though it just sends a bolt of pain through him. Fuck. He doesn’t want to die. Dean is going to devastated. “Paige! Help me! Paige!”

There’s a bright light in the corner of his eyes and an woman around his dad’s age with bright hair red hair is leaning over him.

Then she touches him, but her touch doesn’t hurt.

He looks down and the wound on his chest closes, skin clear and unharmed, pain retreating to only a memory.

“He saved me,” the woman says. “He can move things!”

The redhead’s eyebrows rise. “You have active powers?”

They’re always so surprised by that. Sam’s more impressed with the fact that she just healed him. “I get premonitions too. What are you?”

“You get,” she starts then cuts herself off. “Where’s your whitelighter?”

He stares. “My what?”

She raises a hand to her head and groans. “Oh, someone’s really messed up somewhere. Leo!”

Guardian angels are real, called whitelighters, and apparently witches with active powers who go around saving innocents are supposed to have them to help keep them from getting themselves killed in the process.

Leo, who’s something called an elder with a kind face, says an unconventional witch deserves an unconventional whitelighter.

Chris Halliwell is his age, half witch, and also has telekinesis.

Oh, and he’s apparently his cousin. His very, very, very distant cousin.

“Are all witches related?” he asks incredulously.

“No,” Chris says, long dark hair and hazel eyes doing more to aid his claim of family than the spell his mother had cast. He and Chris look more related than him and Dean do. “We’d thought all the other branches of the Warren line had died out. You’re a surprise.”

Great. He’s a freak even among witches.

It’s so much easier now that he’s not desperately trying to piece together everything on his own, with only the occasional help from the innocents he saves. Chris is sarcastic and annoying and funny and more than having a guardian angel, Sam’s relieved to just have a friend he doesn’t have to lie to for once.

The Halliwell house, with its potion ingredients and powerful witches and home cooking, is only an orb away. He mostly hangs out with Chris, of course, but Piper always invites him to stay for dinner and Paige checks in on him, feeling somewhat responsible for him since she met him first, and Wyatt’s friendly enough but Chris sends him packing whenever Sam’s there.

He’s pulling doubletime when it comes to saving innocents, doing it as a witch and as a hunter, and he’s still maintaining straight As on top of it all while lying about half his life to his father and brother. It’s a stack of cards that’s bound to fall apart.

Going to Stanford is about more than just escaping his father.

It gets him close enough to San Francisco that he won’t need to be orbed to the Halliwells. It’s supposed to give him some breathing room, to let him focus on being a witch, to let him get his education. He does more good as a witch than as a hunter, but it’s not like that’s something he can explain to his family.

He’d wanted out, needed out, before he gets himself or someone else killed trying to balance it all. But he hadn’t thought his father would kick him out. He hadn’t thought Dean would let him.

He goes to the bus station but doesn’t buy a ticket. He calls Chris and spends the rest of the summer at Halliwell manor, burying all his hurt under training with Chris and saving people and getting ready to start college in September.

Jess wears a pentacle around her neck and keeps salt in small bowls in each of the cardinal directions and Sam doesn’t intend to tell her that he’s a witch, but when he ends up saving her from a darklighter attack, that decision is taken out of his hands. Coming clean about the hunter part takes longer, but it’s a bit of an easier sell once the knowledge of the supernatural is already out there. The thing that surprised her most of all is that things like bullets and steel can be used successfully against monsters, rather than the existence of monsters themselves.

Three years later when Dean shows up at their door, Sam can’t bring himself to deny him. It’s one weekend. He’d never wanted to lose his family in the first place.

When he returns home to Jessica pinned to the ceiling, he doesn’t even have to think.

He yanks her down, catching her in his arms just as fire effulges the place she’d been. He pushes the fire away from them, but it fights him harder than demonic fire usually does and leaves his hands burned and blistering. He doesn’t care. Jess is bleeding and in shock but still alive, breath rattling against him. “CHRIS!”

Dean’s yelling for him, but Sam can’t let him in. He throws his hand out, keeping his bedroom door closed even as his brother throws his body against it, still screaming his name.

Chris orbs in, eyes going huge. “Sam, what-”

“Heal her then go,” he snaps, the smoke already hurting his throat. “I’ll explain later.”

He puts his glowing hands over her bleeding stomach and the wound closes, her body going slack and her breathing easing even as her eyes roll back.

Sam tenses. “Is she-”

“Fine, let’s go, your hands,” Chris says, hands already glowing as he reaches for him.

“SAM!” Dean shouts, sounding like he’s about two seconds away from trying to shoot through the door.

“You can heal me later,” he says. “Thank you. Go.”

Chris shoots him a bitchy look that Paige says they share and then he orbs away. The fire’s covered almost the entire room now and Sam finally lets go of the door.

Dean stumbles in, pale, already reaching for him.

Sam stands and finds his knees buckling, gritting his teeth to keep himself upright. “Take her,” he says urgently, pressing Jess into his brother’s arms. “We have to go.”

“You think?” he snaps, but he’s gentle with Jess. Sam shoves him towards the door, slamming it behind him just as it surges after them. Keeping the flames from killing them is one of the hardest things he’s ever done. No wonder he’s exhausted.

They stumble downstairs, away from the fire, and someone’s already called the ambulance.

The story’s an easy sell because it’s not like anyone would believe the truth. They say Jess took sleeping pills and Sam came home to flames. He pulled Jess out and has the burns to prove it. Dean saw the flames in the window and went up, helping to get them both out.

It’s almost true.

“He had yellow eyes,” Jess tells him after. “He was – Sam, I’ve seen demons, I’ve fought demons. He’s something else.”

“Different kind of demons,” Sam says. There’s the underworld, and there’s hell. Underworld demons go after witches mostly. Hell demons go after mortals and are a lot harder to kill, ironically. “It’s the same demon that killed my mother, Jess, and now it’s after you. I have to take care of this.”

Dean’s too relieved about Sam’s determination to rejoin the hunt to question him too closely about all this. He knows better than to think that will last for very long.

Chris agrees to watch over Jess for him even though she’s not technically one of his charges. They layer protection spells on her, including one cast by the power of three, and even this yellow eyed demon will be hard pressed to break through that.

Hell demons are tricky. They’re not as susceptible to witch magic. But Sam’s not just a witch.

He’s a hunter too.

#well this got away from me #i'm sure you're all shocked #dean gets electrocuted and is like well guess i'm going to die #sam is like uh huh yeah sure and just straight up tells dean to close his eyes and trust him and has chris heal him #chris thinks the whole charade is stupid when dean's a witch too #sam's like dean's a WHAT?#and then has to be like is it unethical to not tell dean we come from a line of a powerful witches and his powers have been bound #the halliwells are like ?? yes???#sam tries to broach the subject with dean but it goes so poorly that he gives up #dean's powers are empathy and explosions #the day his powers are unbound is the worst and best day of sam's life #supernatural #charmed #also yes the timelines don't make sense together but whatever time is fake

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